In 1981, Jerry Summers learned by phone that his mother was likely to die in the next few days. He jumped in the car and drove from his Indiana home to Illinois. There he spent the next week in the hospital by her side, sleeping on couches and expecting any conversation with her to be their last.

He was wrong. She made it through the week and out of the hospital, against the odds, and lived for years longer. But Summers’s own health was changed. “I emerged from the week drinking water in huge amounts and going to the bathroom at every opportunity,” he recalled.

“By God,” he realized. “I’ve got diabetes.”

At the time, Summers was a lively 41-year-old. He ran five miles a day, even when that was not a thing people did. At 170 pounds, his body was not round or doughy, or any other descriptive term suggestive of metabolic disharmony—not someone a doctor would expect to develop diabetes. Summers accepted the diagnosis reluctantly.

“I remain convinced that genetics and the stress with my mother were the precipitating factors,” he recalled. His mother had been obese and had developed diabetes later in life, and his sister died at age three with a juvenile-onset version—but his own was not a prototypical “type 1” or “type 2” case. Summers has come to reject that duality altogether: “It was not obesity, poor diet, lack of exercise, or wrath of God.”

Despite running daily for decades, he now requires insulin. He counts grams of carbohydrates at every meal to estimate an effective dose, still sometimes overdosing and causing his blood sugar to plummet. It often feels much like a guessing game. During his decades living with the disease, medical science has seen progress in the treatment, but no cure. Lifestyle changes can go far, but cases like Summers’s illustrate their limitations.

Much of that comes down to gaps in understanding of what exactly is happening in the metabolic pathways of people with diabetes. This is especially vexing to Jerry’s son, Scott Summers, who was 14-years-old at the time of his father’s diagnosis. That day Scott vowed to find a cure.

Liver cells infiltrated with white fat cells on the left, and after ceramide reduction (right), where the white fat cells are noticeably smaller (Scott Summers)

Scott was not named for the Scott Summers of Marvel fame (more commonly known as Cyclops), but this was the analogous origin story of a scientist. His father’s diagnosis was Scott’s transformative moment—his spider bite, radiation blast, or, in the case of Cyclops, attack of his family’s spacecraft by the interstellar Shi’ar Empire. And unlike some children who promise to cure their parents but then go into finance or real estate, Summers actually went to graduate school and got a Ph.D. in physiology.

When Scott left the Midwest to work in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, he got his first insight toward a hypothesis that he believes could revolutionize our understanding of human metabolism and disease—and could help explain why skinny people aren’t necessarily metabolically healthy, or vice versa.

“We now know that both lean and obese individuals are susceptible to diabetes,” Summers, now the chair of nutrition and integrative physiology at the University of Utah, explained to me. “We think it’s basically because of their lipid compositions, and the accumulation of one type in particular—called ceramides—that might be increasing susceptibility of people to diabetes.”

At the heart of this idea is the model that says obesity is associated with diabetes and heart disease because all three are due to an error in the way the body stores energy. We carry most fat as triglycerides in adipose (“fat”) cells, which contain tremendous amounts of energy.

“That’s a pretty safe way to store it,” Summers explains. At least, it’s not necessarily unhealthy to have this type of fat. “But some of that stored fat can actually spill out into another pathway and give rise to ceramides. We think those tend to be pretty toxic.”

Ceramides are a family of waxy lipids that have even been called “toxic fat,” as they were in the press release for Summers’s latest study in the journal Cell Metabolism. The researcher Bhagirath Chaurasia, who works with Summers, clarified that “toxic fat” is an accurate, non-sensational term, in that ceramides are involved in the process of lipotoxicity. That is, they cause dysfunction in other lipids. Because in addition to storing triglycerides, adipose cells also help the body sense its nutritional status by secreting compounds that communicate with other cells. Among those signals are ceramides, and alterations in this process seem to be at the root of much metabolic disease.

As with all substances deemed “toxins,” of course, the toxicity of ceramides is all about context. Ceramides are also part of sphingomyelin, the predominant lipid in many cell membranes. They account for about half of the fat in our skin, too— specifically the fat-rich matrix between mature skin cells that prevents water loss and impedes infectious agents. Ceramide-containing skin products have been shown to “hydrate and moisturize the epidermis” and aid in epidermal rebuilding. There’s no apparent danger in rubbing ceramides on your skin.

At the same time, Summers’s work suggests that ceramides play an influential role in the most common derangement of human metabolism today. In 2007, the Utah team found that mice who produced fewer ceramides were protected from diabetes and fatty liver disease. Since then, the researchers have been testing effects in human cells. There ceramides proved to decrease metabolic activity of fat tissue. As Chaurasia explains it, once ceramide synthesis is blocked, “Fat cells can burn more calories and become more sensitive to insulin. It also helps to increase the number of beige or brown adipose cells.”

Increasing brown adipose tissue (sometimes referred to as “good fat”) is a goal of many metabolism enthusiasts. While most adipose cells appear white, brown adipose is full of iron-rich mitochondria that are metabolically active. These cells burn energy instead of simply storing it. Having more brown fat is generally healthy, encouraging its formation hasn’t proven easy. As NIH director Francis Collins wrote in 2013, figuring out how to transform some of our white fat into brown fat “may be the first step toward developing game changing treatments for diabetes and obesity.”

Summers’ ceramide discoveries are a promising part of that step.

Fat tissue. Relative to the panels on the left, the right panels show an increase in brown fat cells that occurs following ceramide depletion. (Scott Summers)

The potential commercial and scientific implications are serious. If some people simply have a genetic susceptibility to accumulate ceramides, blocking that pathway with a drug could be an effective approach to preventing diabetes. And for the millions of humans today with metabolic disease, this approach could moderate at least some impact of overeating and a sedentary life.

Summers’s team is now investigating practical ways to influence ceramide levels, with an eye to pharmaceuticals and specific lifestyle guidelines to mitigate risk (beyond broad platitudes about diet and exercise). For one, the ceramide-forming pathway seems to be blocked by, of all things, exposure to cold temperatures. While Summers is not an advocate of taking ice baths or wearing ice vests, as some cohorts of scientists are, his discovery could explain some of the metabolic benefits of being cold.

Even if none of this potential promise is realized, Summers believes his overarching message is critical: That type-two diabetes “is not simply a consequence of laziness or sloth.” It’s rather the result of complex orchestrations of processes that can’t always be dismissed as products of weak will or turpitude of character. Those dismissal stigmatize and stagnate research and treatment. And of course Scott’s father Jerry seems to be living proof of the complexity at play—both within his own cells and without.

“I was running seven miles a day until six months ago,” he told me last week. “Then I had to take a third job. Now I find it very difficult to work in running at all.”

At 77, Jerry is now driving for Uber. The last time he saw Scott, Jerry reminded him that he promised to find a cure. “I said, you better be hustlin’ up, because I’m running out of time.”

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”